Ernest Hemingway at the Swap Meet

He walked a little ways to the place where they sold the roasted ears of corn with the mayonaise and the chili and the lime. I will have two of them, he said to the man who sold the corn.

He walked for a time along the highway from where he had parked his car to the entrance of the swap meet, where he gave a woman three dollars to pay for his entrance and also to receive a raffle ticket. They would call out the number of the winner, the woman told him. He would have to be present to win. He put the ticket in his pocket and he walked past a stall where a very fat man was hanging black silk screened tapestries of Biggie and of Tupac and of the Aztec Warrior with the maiden in his arms. He stood and stared at the man and the tapestries for some time, then turned and continued on, drawn by the yipping of dogs. He wanted very much to see what kind of dogs it was doing the yipping. He hoped they would be finely muscled pit bull puppies. Walking towards the sound, he could almost imagine the pitbull bitch lying on her side, her pitbull puppies nursing at her, one particularly strong one pushing his brothers and sisters out of the way to get better purchase at the milk of his mother. He hoped that they would be blue pitbull puppies, and if they were he had already decided that he would buy one and that he would name it Thugzilla, and that he would not geld him but would stand him to stud and look on as Thugzilla unmentionabled the pitbull bitches who came to be unmentionabled by Thugzilla. But when he arrived at the place where the dogs were yipping, the puppies were of some mongrel breed, some unmentionably mongrel breed, nothing in their faces that spoke of heart, or of strength, or of the things that would make a dog stand to something twice its size without fear. He walked away, sick, and went to the place where the men gathered under the shade of a blue tarp at picnic tables, drinking Bud lights and Miller lights, and he asked the man who was selling the beers if there was any Tecate, but there was no Tecate, and so he bought a Bud light and sat among the men, drinking and listening to the buzzing of the flies. The roosters, one of the men said. The roosters were supposed to be here today, but they are not. They were seized by the police, another man said, though no one had asked. It’s rotten, the man said. It’s rotten not to have the roosters here. I would have liked to see them fight. I would have liked that very much. He drank from his Bud light with the men who like him wanted badly to see the roosters fighting one another with the slivers of razor attached to their feet, to place money on the roosters although it was not about the winning or losing of money. The winning and losing of money was the chili and the lime on the ear of corn but it was not the ear of corn. The roosters fighting with their razor slivers were the corn and also the mayonnaise, which held the chili and lime to the roasted ears of corn which even now the man could smell coming from a booth that he could not see.